On the shores of the Rivers of America in Disneyland USA is one of the park's most interesting, unsung attractions. Virtually every Disney fan who knows of the existence of the Petrified Tree knows the story of how it arrived in the Happiest Place on Earth: how Walt bought it for Lillian as a birthday present because it was filled with opal and how she donated it to the park. What is the story of this natural marvel before it got to Disneyland? How did it form and what do we know of the environment when it lived millions of years ago?
Anything with the name Disney attached to it invites the image of the multimedia conglomerate with its chains of theme parks, cross-platform franchises and intermittently successful tentpole films. It is an industry, an empire in full expansion mode swallowing up every available license like a neighbouring Gallic province. As shareholders look to the bottom line of immediate returns and go about laying off its creative producers, it can be increasingly difficult to see Disney’s output as a work of art. There are even pressures within the Disney fan community to stifle you from looking at it in that way. Any artistic criticism - in the proper academic sense of the term as the rational evaluation of art - is frequently shouted down with endless thought-terminating clichés like “Disneyland is not a museum” or assertions that one should embrace the Disney “magic” without thinking too hard about the product’s integrity.
One of the beautiful things about the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’s Presidio is that it gives the individual some space to consider these questions. After all, it is a museum. As a museum, it is a place for contemplation of the life and work of not only Walt Disney, but the legion of artists he brought together like Mary Blair and Ub Iwerks. It allows the visitor to examine both the technical craft as well as the visual artistry, in an environment that is itself incredibly well designed.
The gods have been angered by all this celebratin'!
Since opening in 1963, the Hawaiian War Chant has served as the dramatic climax of the Enchanted Tiki Room show. Tikis start chanting, drums start beating, orchids start howling, and the pace quickens and quickens until thunder sounds to silence the cacophony. With the exception of the title song, the Enchanted Tiki Room utilizes many pieces of music that were at least known, if not popular, when it opened. For example, when it came time to tighten the show for the demands of modern, harried audiences, it was a piece by Romantic classical composer Jacques Offenbach that was excised. Thankfully the Hawaiian War Chant remains!
It is said that the original version of the song was written by Prince Leleiohoku II of Hawaii's royal family. Though he passed away in 1877 at the age of 23 of rheumatic fever, he wrote countless songs based on the folk melodies of the islands. In its original form, Hawaiian War Chant was called Kāua I Ka Huahua'i or We Two in the Spray, and it was not a war chant at all. The original lyrics describe e a clandestine meeting between two lovers...
You and I in the spray
Such joy, the two of us together
Embracing tightly in the coolness
Breathing deep of the palai fern
Chorus:
Oh, such spray
Listen
My desire
Don't linger
Lest we be found
I loved you
Your warmth
Calmed passion
Preventing thought
The Cowel Glee Club recorded the original version in 1911 for Columbia Records, but the more renowned version was first played by Big Band leader Johnny Noble in the Thirties. Looking for new numbers for his band's performances in the Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach, he reworked Kāua I Ka Huahua'i into the up-tempo Jazz piece we know today.
Tommy Dorsey and his Big Band brought it off the beach and into America's homes through his 1938 recording for Victor Records. His band went on to perform it in the 1942 film Ship Ahoy, and from there is took off into popular culture. While the Disney company and Disney fans today tend to take a more insular view of Disneyland, I don't think it can really be overstated how responsive the first generation of Imagineers were to pop-culture and popular films around them. They were themselves impressionable young men in the Thirties, Forties and early Fifties, and pop-culture beyond Disney's own products provided the common vocabulary with which they connected to the dreams of the American public. The vision of Main Street USA was formed less by Walt's boyhood experiences in Marceline, Missouri, as it was by films like The Gay Nineties (1933 and 1942), Mae West's Belle of the Nineties (1934) and She Done Him Wrong (1933), and Abbott and Costello's The Naughty Nineties (1945). Though named for Mark Twain, it is no accident that this paddlewheel steamship was christened by one of the chief actresses of the 1936 version of Show Boat. The Jungle Cruise is known to have been based loosely on the 1951 film African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and Harper Goff directly lifted his designs for the saloon in the 1953 musical Calamity Jane when creating the Golden Horseshoe. The Enchanted Tiki Room was itself a response to the post-war Tiki fad, and when they went about selecting music for it, they climaxed with an old standard: The Hawaiian War Chant.
The hotter-than-hot version of Hawaiian War Chant performed by the Tommy Dorsey Band for Ship Ahoy.
Yesterday Disney plastered social media with the new trailer for the forthcoming Maleficent, featuring a cover of "Once Upon a Dream" by Lana Del Rey. Here it is...
When I saw it I have to admit that I laughed, since I'd been waiting for the part where the two armies charge at each other and the big CGI monsters toss around the little CGI humans. On the one hand I loveSleeping Beauty, which is my favourite fairy tale of all time (to the point of our going to the real castle in France which inspired it), and I love Maleficent, who is one of Disney's most stunning character designs. On the other hand this is such a transparent attempt to mimic the success of Wicked while at the same time divesting it of anything that makes Wicked so good and transplanting it with all the tropes common to Alice the Great and Powerful Giant-Killer and the Huntsman: Witch Hunters of the Rings. It's got a good song though!
"Once Upon a Dream" is familiar to fans of Disney's 1959 animated version of Sleeping Beauty, but like the entire soundtrack, it was adapted by George Bruns from the original Tchaikovsky ballet. The tune we know as "Once Upon a Dream" is actually the "Garland Waltz" from Act 1, which opens the ballet. If you'd like a bit of cute overload to begin your week, the following video is the Academy of Russian Ballet's performance of the waltz for the Youth America Grand Prix...
Though Pele longed for her lost love Lohiau, who loved her but ultimately rejected her uncontrollable temper, she met her match in Kamapua'a.
Carving of Kamapua'a.
Collection of the Baily House Museum, Maui.
Born to his mother Hina and father Kahiki-ula, and is considered an incarnate form of Lono, the god of rain and agriculture. He grew up as a trickster by necessity, given that he was a man-pig. Despite being a useful labourer for his brothers and mother, his nature as a pig resulted in his constantly being hunted by Chief Olopana of the island of O'ahu. Kamapua'a evaded him for a very long time, using his powers to turn himself into a tiny piglet in a sow's litter to grass and trees. Olopana wasn't totally to blame though: Kamapua'a was stealing and eating his chickens. Eventually, Kamapua'a killed Olopana himself and swam across the ocean in the form of the humuhumunukunukuapua'a fish (which is Hawaii's official state fish). He came ashore in Tahiti and proceeded to marry the daughters of the local chief there.
One fateful night, however, the fires of Pele summon Kamapua'a back to Hawaii. Assuming fish form once again, he swam back to the island and came to this intriguing new paramour. Though he assumed human shape to woo her, Pele could see through this to his pig form and began to mock him. They engaged in a war of bitter quips that enflamed to torrents of lava and ash being hurled at Kamapua'a. Thankfully his younger sister was born as a rain cloud and could subdue the pyroclastic fury. As they continued to fight, a grudging respect was born that developed into unquenchable passion. Pele and Kamapua'a succumbed to one another. For days. Awkwardly, Pele's brothers and sisters comment on her shameful behavior, which causes them to call a truce to their... activities... and share a meal. In the process they divide up the big island of Hawaii: Pele receives the regions of Puna, Kona, and Ka'u, which are the most volcanically active areas of the island. Kamapua'a receives Hilo, Hamakua, and Kohala, which are verdant rainforests.
It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not quite so white. At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden--a ceaseless bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor. The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they appeared.
These words, written by the great American novelist Mark Twain in his book Roughing It, describe Halema'uma'u crater on Kilauea. This pit of lava is within the summit caldera of Kilauea, reaching a further 270 feet below the floor of the main crater. It is a circle roughly 2.5 by 2.9 thousand feet across, constantly belching sulphurous gasses and stony projectiles. The Hawiian Volcano Observatory on the rim of Kilauea, which is now within Hawaiian Volcanos National Park, has declared Halema'uma'u "very active" and suspended all hiking trails, roadways and overlooks to the site. Through 2008, a series of eruption events forced the evacuation of the National Park, and it remains a volatile crater to this day. Halema'uma'u is also the seat of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of Fire and Volcanos, and she is angry.
